ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Archimedean property

Hey there little buddy! Today we're going to learn about something called the Archimedean property. Imagine you have a bunch of marbles and you want to make a tower with them. The taller you want your tower, the more marbles you'll need, right? The Archimedean property is all about how we can measure how many marbles we need to make our tower as tall as we want it to be.

Imagine you have a rectangle. You can make it longer by adding more squares to it. The Archimedean property says that if you keep adding more and more squares to the rectangle, eventually it will get long enough to fit any length you want. It's like stretching a rubber band - the more you stretch it, the longer it gets.

In math, we can use the Archimedean property to help us figure out how many numbers there are between two other numbers. For example, if we wanted to know how many numbers there are between 1 and 10, we could use the Archimedean property to figure it out.

We start with the number 1 and add 1 to it. We keep adding 1 until we get to 10. Each time we add 1, we're getting closer and closer to 10. Eventually, we'll get past 10 and we'll have counted all the numbers between 1 and 10. So the Archimedean property tells us that there are 10 numbers between 1 and 10.

Overall, the Archimedean property is just a fancy way of saying that we can always find a big enough number by adding more and more of a smaller number to it. It's kind of like building a tower of marbles or stretching a rubber band - the more we add to it, the bigger it gets!